“Wouldn’t it be great to communicate with voice in an environment where you normally wouldn’t be able to?” said Thad Starner, a computing professor at Georgia Tech. But experts think the technology has much potential, not only in the consumer space for activities such as dictation but also in industry. The only downside is that users will have to wear a device strapped to their face, a barrier smart glasses such as Google Glass failed to overcome. The eventual goal is to make interfacing with AI assistants such as Google’s Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri less embarrassing and more intimate, allowing people to communicate with them in a manner that appears to be silent to the outside world – a system that sounds like science fiction but appears entirely possible. It can already be used to control a basic user interface such as the Roku streaming system, moving and selecting content, and can recognise numbers, play chess and perform other basic tasks. Kapur and team are currently working on collecting data to improve recognition and widen the number of words AlterEgo can detect. The human threshold for voice word accuracy is thought to be around 95%. That’s several percentage points below the 95%-plus accuracy rate that Google’s voice transcription service is capable of using a traditional microphone, but Kapur says the system will improve in accuracy over time.
#Alter ego free voices trial
The AlterEgo device managed an average of 92% transcription accuracy in a 10-person trial with about 15 minutes of customising to each person. Maes and her students, including Kapur, have been experimenting with new form factors and interfaces to provide the knowledge and services of smartphones without the intrusive disruption they currently cause to daily life. “If I want to look something up that’s relevant to a conversation I’m having, I have to find my phone and type in the passcode and open an app and type in some search keyword, and the whole thing requires that I completely shift attention from my environment and the people that I’m with to the phone itself.” But at the moment, the use of those devices is very disruptive,” said Pattie Maes, a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT. “We basically can’t live without our cellphones, our digital devices. The idea is to create a outwardly silent computer interface that only the wearer of the AlterEgo device can speak to and hear. The computer can then respond through the device using a bone conduction speaker that plays sound into the ear without the need for an earphone to be inserted, leaving the wearer free to hear the rest of the world at the same time. 01:22 Watch the AlterEgo being demonstrated – video
0 kommentar(er)
